Reporter's Notebook

Scroll down to find all the staff notes and reader reactions to the controversies over race and free speech on college campuses. (A similar debate on campus PC and mental health is here, spurred by our Sept ‘15 cover story.) Join the discussion via email.

“F*** you, you filthy white f***s!” “F*** you and your comfort!” “F*** you, you racist s***!” These shouted epithets were the first indication that many students had of the coming storm. [...] The flood of demonstrators self-consciously overstepped every boundary, opening the doors of study spaces with students reviewing for exams. Those who tried to close their doors were harassed further. One student abandoned the study room and ran out of the library. The protesters followed her out of the library, shouting obscenities the whole way.

Students who refused to listen to or join their outbursts were shouted down. “Stand the f*** up!” “You filthy racist white piece of s***!” [...] Another woman was pinned to a wall by protesters who unleashed their insults, shouting “filthy white b****!” in her face.

Many of the demonstrators then approached the sitting students and chanted “F**k your white privilege” and “F**k your white asses,” demonstrator Dan Korff-Korn ’19 said. “It was important to point out that the students sitting there in the library at the computers represented this greater degree of ignorance, apathy and privilege that you see at Dartmouth, but the way it was done by personally attacking people was counterproductive,” Korff-Korn said. [...] “While I don’t think the protest should happen again to the extent where people are being yelled at and making people cry, I think the invasion of space needed to be done,” [student David] Tramonte said.

The college administration has stepped in to say sorry—to the protestors:

Vice provost for student affairs Inge-Lise Ameer was in attendance at the meeting, and she apologized to students who engaged in the protest for the negative responses and media coverage that they have received. “There’s a whole conservative world out there that’s not being very nice,” Ameer said.

Occidental College is the latest campus to join the domino effect of students calling for the firing of top administrators. One of the activists occupying the office of the vice president since Monday is Olivia Davis, who outlines here the demands of Oxy United for Black Liberation, which include “Hir[ing] much needed physicians of color at Emmons Wellness Center to treat physical and emotional trauma associated with issues of identity” and the immediate removal of President Jonathan Veitch:

As a white, cis, affluent, heterosexual man he has the privilege to not have to consider the violence I face everyday. … [T]his movement is a manifestation of the daily microaggressions, discrimination, and other facets of marginalization we come to know as our college experience. It looks like a white student cussing me out my freshman year, calling me stupid when I told him that he couldn’t essentialize the existence of Black people to struggling through crime and poverty in “the hood.” It also looks like the time that I heard an entire room of white students say n***a at a party my first year. It’s the time that my professor refused to speak up in class when a white student referred to black men as “threatening and violent.” And again the time that I watched womxn -- black womxn -- around me encounter gross amounts of misogynoir when reporting their sexual assaults. It is everyday that I have to walk through this institution internalizing all of the psychic violence enacted on black students and students of color that makes me believe that I do not belong here.

As students, we are willing to let our academic performance suffer in order to ensure our survival. This is why creating safe spaces and protecting marginalized students should be the responsibility of the administration.

In the op-ed, Davis doesn’t cite anything that Veitch did to trigger the calls for his ouster, not even something as small a poorly worded email that forced out Claremont McKenna’s dean, an impolitic remark that precipitated the removal of Mizzou’s president, or an email about Halloween costumes that threatened the jobs of two faculty members at Yale. The most tangible thing Davis cites: “Veitch has been given over 49 demands from three different groups of students; only 3 of those demands have been met.” (The full list isn’t provided.) And she completely dismisses the defense of Veitch by the chair of the Board of Trustees:

Veitch was extolled for his supposed accomplishments. One of which being his “tireless[ness] in hiring a diverse faculty and staff.” In 2013 the college had 7% black faculty, 10% Latinx faculty, and 12% API faculty. A school where over two thirds of tenured faculty is white can ever be commended for hiring diverse faculty and staff.

Two-thirds of Americans nationwide—64 percent—are White. “7% black faculty, 10% Latinx faculty” are indeed lower than the nationwide numbers of 12 percent Black and 16 percent Hispanic, but Occidental’s “12% API ” is far outpacing the 5 percent of Americans who are Asian or Pacific Islander (API). Should White faculty be fired to fill precise racial quotas? Should the API percentage also be lowered?

The percentage of students at Occidental this year who are African American is 4.5 percent, so “7% black faculty” is in fact overly representative. It would be wonderful if both numbers were higher, but should a president lose his job over it, a president whose institution ranks 13 among hundreds of liberal arts colleges in terms of ethnic diversity?

Occidental College is also notable for having one of its former students go on to become the first African American to be elected and reelected President of the United States. He didn’t appear to need a safe space:

“It’s a wonderful, small liberal arts college,” President Obama says of Oxy. “The professors were diverse and inspiring. I ended up making some lifelong friendships there, and those first two years really helped me grow up.” … Oxy was the place where the future president made his first political speech on Feb. 18, 1981 as part of a movement to persuade the Occidental Board of Trustees to divest the College of its investments in South Africa. “I found myself drawn into a larger role [in the divestment movement] … I noticed that people had begun to listen to my opinions,” Obama recalled.

Many young Millennials may not know that South Africa in 1981 was governed under something called apartheid, a brutal system of racial segregation and physical violence.

In September, Obama joined the debate over the new campus politics by saying, in part, “I don’t agree that you, when you become students at colleges, have to be coddled and protected from different points of view.” Will a reporter ask him about his old college? Update: I missed Obama’s interview with Stephanopoulos this week:

OBAMA: [...] The civil-rights movement happened because there was civil disobedience, because people were willing to get to go to jail, because there were events like Bloody Sunday. But it was also because the leadership of the movement consistently stayed open to the possibility of reconciliation and sought to understand the views, even views that were appalling to them of the other side.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Because there does seem to be a strain on some of these campuses of a kind of militant political correctness where you shut down the other side.

OBAMA: And I disagree with that. And, it's interesting. You know, I've now got, you know, daughters who — one is about to go to college — the other one's — you know, going to be on her way in a few years. And then we talk about this at the dinner table.

And I say to them, "Listen, if you hear somebody using a racial epithet, if you hear somebody who's anti-Semitic, if you see an injustice, I want you to speak out. And I want you to be firm and clear and I want you to protect people who may not have voices themselves. I want you to be somebody who's strong and sees themselves as somebody who's looking out for the vulnerable."

But I tell 'em — "I want you also to be able to listen. I don't want you to think that a display of your strength is simply shutting other people up. And that part of your ability to bring about change is going to be by engagement and understanding the viewpoints and the arguments of the other side." And so when I hear, for example, you know, folks on college campuses saying, "We're not going to allow somebody to speak on our campus because we disagree with their ideas or we feel threatened by their ideas —" you know, I think that's a recipe for dogmatism. And I think you're not going to be as effective. And so, but I want to be clear here 'cause, and it's a tough issue because, you know, there are two values that I care about.

I care about civil rights and I care about kids not being discriminated against or having swastikas painted on their doors or nooses hung — thinking it's a joke. I think it's entirely appropriate for — any institution, including universities, to say, "Don't walk around in blackface. It offends people. Don't wear a headdress and beat your chest if Native American students have said, you know, 'This hurts us. This bothers us." There's nothing wrong with that.

But we also have these values of free speech. And it's not free speech in the abstract. The purpose of that kind of free speech is to make sure that we are forced to use argument and reason and words in making our democracy work. And you know, then you don't have to be fearful of somebody spouting bad ideas. Just out-argue 'em, beat 'em.

Make the case as to why they're wrong. Win over adherents. That's how — that's how things work in — in a democracy. And I do worry if young people start getting trained to think that if somebody says something I don't like, if somebody says something that hurts my feelings that my only recourse is to shut them up, avoid them, push them away, call on a higher power to protect me from that. You know, and yes, does that put more of a burden on minority students or gay students or Jewish students or others in a majority that may be blind to history and blind to their hurt? It may put a slightly higher burden on them.

But you're not going to make the kinds of deep changes in society — that those students want, without taking it on, in a full and clear and courageous way. And you know, I tell you I trust Malia in an argument. If a knucklehead on a college campus starts talking about her, I guarantee you she will give as good as she gets.

The prolific Freddie deBoer from Purdue responds at length to the two Atlantic readers in this note. His post is well worth reading for anyone interested in this subject and the “turns” within academia—in Freddie’s case, quantitative research within English departments. Another reader joins the debate:

The newest generation of scholars (myself included) have been increasingly focused on the nuts and bolts of how institutions, movements, and networks in history functioned. While not ignoring the very real insights from our linguistically-inclined predecessors, we seem to be more interested in the tangible, material, aspect of historical problems.

It’s not that questions of identity and language don’t matter to us, but we have taken investigations to the next level. Or so it seems to me from the shore of Lake Michigan. I wanted to share that view with you in the spirit of (as historians love to do) “complicating” an already fascinating discussion.

There are some big issues here, and strong feelings—about race, about privilege, about the First Amendment and other civil rights. Yet what strikes me after reading a lot of news coverage is how irrelevant all this is to the world at large, or even to the academy. I am sure the students who feel aggrieved by aggressions micro- and macro-, and the administrators afraid for their jobs, think it is highly meaningful, and politicians will ride the issue of “political correctness” as far as they can.

The problem is that the ideological center of the discussion resides in, and is almost entirely limited to, the humanities. Contrary to the self-congratulatory narrative of academic humanists, poets are not the unacknowledged legislators of mankind.

Here is something you will never see in any syllabus: “Trigger warning: nature of reality. The following chapter on quantum mechanics contains a discussion of entanglement and Bell’s Theorem, and may raise fundamental questions about the nature of time and space, and therefore reality, thus causing discomfort and a feeling of being unsafe on the part of those grounded in a Newtonian world view.”

Nor this: “The following chapter and related labs on developmental biology may cause discomfort to some religious groups who do not believe in evolution, to those who believe in inherent racial superiority, or to those who are afraid of blood.”

Cheap satire? Maybe, but that’s not my intent. Actually, I myself am terrified by the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics and by the fact that I am dependent on so many devices and technologies the workings of which I cannot comprehend. That’s my point: Our true rulers care very little for the arguments that mean much to those of us schooled in the humanities. There is nothing “postmodern,” there is no “cultural turn,” there are no meaningful “intersectionalities” in a university’s schools of medicine, business, engineering, or in any STEM department.

And that is where the money is. In terms of the university budget, that is where it comes from, and that is where it goes. That translates to power and relevance. The rest of us are just playing at being Matthew Arnold or Cornel West. The only reason the news media are paying any attention at all is that they are in the reality TV business. With all due respect to the semioticians and SJWs, you cannot change the reality of the Higgs Boson by giving it a different name, nor can you check its privilege.

Update from a reader who quotes the previous one:

“With all due respect to the semioticians and SJWs, you cannot change the reality of the Higgs Boson by giving it a different name, nor can you check its privilege.” I take his or her point to be that science is made up of universal, constant laws, which scientists only need to discover and acknowledge. Thus the fields of physics, mathematics, engineering, medicine, etc., are immune from any cultural or social critique of their theory or practice.

This kind of ahistorical nonsense—like something out of a 1950s sci-fi novel—is what happens when individuals embrace some ideal notion of “science” as its own complete ethos. The entire history of the practice of science since Copernicus has been that of a constant struggle between human scientists making empirical observations and the cultural frameworks of those same scientists. These frameworks almost always determine how scientists interpret the meaning of the information they observe.

From Kepler—who was convinced that the planets’ orbits had to follow patterns that matched the shapes of perfect geometric solids—to Einstein, who refused to accept the reality of quantum mechanics because “God does not play at dice,” science always has existed and will always exist in a particular cultural and social context that shapes what scientists “see.” The fact that so many are willing to put science on a pedestal as some kind of ideal activity speaks to the technocratic moment we’re living in, despite some notion that the “SJW”s are ruining everything for those who simply love facts and truth.

A retort:

You followed my note with a response from a reader who thinks my view of how science relates to its cultural context is backward. S/he wrote:

The entire history of the practice of science since Copernicus has been that of a constant struggle between human scientists making empirical observations and the cultural frameworks of those same scientists. These frameworks almost always determine how scientists interpret the meaning of the information they observe.

Really? Catholic doctrine and The Inquisition determined how Galileo interpreted his observed data? Galileo’s recantation paid tribute to the political correctness of his day, but he did not let it determine his theory (“Still, it moves!”). From the point of view of history, Galileo sat in judgment of the cultural framework of his day, not the other way round.

My respondent’s take sounds like the English Department’s bid for relevancy—“Let the scientists play with their models and ignore us, but we determine the culture, and the culture determines everything. They can speak only on matters of science; we can speak on everything.” Vanity. C.P. Snow’s two cultures are still very much with us on campus, and even further apart than ever.

BTW, the reader also suggested that my comment implied a belief that “the fields of physics, mathematics, engineering, medicine, etc., are immune from any cultural or social critique of their theory or practice.” I didn’t say that nor do I believe it. The theories—and most definitely the practices—of science and technology are definitely liable to criticism, though the persuasiveness of such criticism will have something to do with how well the critic understands the science s/he criticizes.

One letter to the Claremont community, endorsed by nearly 300 students, expressed support for the broad goals to combat racial discrimination. But it called the use of hunger strikes to force the resignation of Mary Spellman, dean of students, “extremely inappropriate.” The letter also castigated the “cyber bullying” of students over an offensive Halloween costume, the filing of a federal civil rights complaint against Claremont and foul language used against administrators at a protest last week.

Details of that Halloween controversy covered in Notes here. And then there’s this tragic irony:

[CMC seniors Rachel Doehr and Katharine Eger] said Spellman had counseled hundreds of students during her years at Claremont and was a particularly strong advocate for those who suffered from sexual assaults. The dean led efforts to establish a new campus center for sexual assault prevention and support and helped strengthen education about the issue at student orientations, among other things, they said.

Safety from sexual violence should be a higher priority than a safe space for offensive speech. Taylor Lemmons, one of the two CMC students who threatened a hunger strike, responds to the backlash at Medium:

This is not to say that Dean Spellman did not help some students. Her actions reflected that she was unable to help all students.

I appreciate the definition of a hunger strike. I do not appreciate the patronizing assumption that I am unaware of what a hunger strike means. “Were Mary Spellman’s offenses so great that you would die for her resignation?”

Yes. I would die for my people: for every student that felt unsupported, not-advocated for and silenced by the Dean of Students office and the former Dean of Students.

As I see it, their core error is not one particular to Yale activists, or participants in the nationwide protest movement about race on campus, but is shared by one faction of the left, diverse in race, gender, and cause of choice, that relies too heavily on stigma and too little on persuasion.

Close, but not quite. The core issue is that the protests are about the activists, not some slight they have been subjected to or, more likely, heard about third hand. Issues are secondary. The core is that the activists want to join the firmament of activists of old. To be a part of a movement to be remembered. If you’re looking for some unifying ideology you’ll be sorely disappointed. Narcissism is the core, not ideology.

I’m a senior at CMC. Thank you for writing the recent note about the protests at Claremont McKenna, as well as the note about the potential effects of letting student activists run campus. It captured exactly what is happening in the aftermath of last week at CMC.

I just wanted to let you know that, while many of the articles about CMC did a very good job capturing the very real racial issues on campus, there is another side to the story that is only now finally being spoken out loud by students. As a student body, many of us were fearful of being labeled “racist,” and we let our Dean of Students take the fall for deeply rooted institutional problems, sacrificing her in the name of rhetoric.

Several students and myself began to share these feelings yesterday on social media and through our blog. We asked alumni, students, faculty, and administration to send in letters of support for Dean Spellman. Some alumni are currently drafting a letter to President Chodosh, requesting him to ask Dean Spellman back to her position. Our message is articulated more clearly in our post, but the sentiment is exactly the same as the piece you wrote.

Many of the letters we have so far received are from students who relied on Dean Spellman for serious mental health support, and they’re heartbreaking. It turns out that wrenching a dean out of the community in the middle of the year has some negative externalities, as this social experiment is proving.

A reader suggests how racially-charged confrontations can not only escalate quickly but result in a disproportionate response towards people of a certain police profile:

Consider for a minute the controversy over the email Erika Christakis wrote at Yale regarding Halloween costumes: “If you don’t like a costume someone is wearing, look away, or tell them you are offended. Talk to each other. Free speech and the ability to tolerate offence are hallmarks of a free and open society...”

This advice strikes me as remarkably detached from the realities young African Americans have grown up with. A discussion of an offensive costume that escalates into a confrontation can end badly, and the record of the American carceral culture gives African American students plenty of reason to believe the police will hold them responsible if it does. Conor Friedersdorf observes that what happens at Yale does not stay there, but the reverse holds also: 40 years of an expanding American carceral culture affects what happens at Yale.

This is, really, not a good set of options presented by Christakis. Going up to a drunk person at a party and telling them you are offended by their costume is unlikely to lead to the sort of productive academic debate that defenders of these remarks seem to be envisioning. Indeed, when “be quiet, or raise your objections at the moment when they are most likely to get you dismissed as a killjoy” is presented as the free speech argument, it is unsurprising that students respond with little respect for the idea of free speech thus presented.

[Cobb] writes as if unaware that millions of Americans believe the defense of free speech and the fight against racism to be complementary causes, and not at odds with each other. The false premises underpinning his analysis exacerbate a persistent, counterproductive gulf between the majority of those struggling against racism in the United States, who believe that First Amendment protections, rigorous public discourse, and efforts to educate empowered, resilient young people are the surest ways to a more just future, and a much smaller group that subscribes to a strain of thought most popular on college campuses.

Conor concludes, “Defenders of the First Amendment aren’t distracting from attention from racism—they’re preserving the tools necessary to struggle against it.” Then Sally Kohn wrote a piece for us diametrically opposed to that view:

[W]hat students from Yale to the University of Missouri and beyond are protesting is a pervasively one-sided definition of offensive behavior that these colleges and society in general still propagate. To this point, as [Cobb noted], “the student’s reaction elicited consternation in certain quarters where the precipitating incident did not.”

Consider, for instance, those in the chattering class who have readily bought into the idea that police feel under attack (as the result of the Black Lives Movement) and at the same time express deep skepticism—if not outright mockery—of people of color who feel under attack by police and by society. This divergent tendency isn’t about evidentiary standards. It’s about race—and the inclination to believe in the righteousness and inherent goodness of white people while perpetually doubting and demeaning people of color. As Roxane Gay wrote for The New Republic:

We cannot ignore what is truly being said by both groups of protesters: That not all students experience Yale equally, and not all students experience Mizzou equally. These conversations were happening well before these protests, and they will continue to happen until students are guaranteed equality of experience. They are still being forced, however, to first prove that it is worth opening a conversation about either.

There’s been a lot of discussion about how the issues at Yale are much bigger than Erika and Nicholas Christakis, and that’s certainly the opinion of many students. Earlier this week, Yale students refocused the narrative and engaged in a thoughtful, powerful demonstration of student activism through a “March of Resilience” to express solidarity for students of color, and a forum to discuss race and diversity on campus. [...] On Tuesday, Yale’s president and the dean of Yale College issued a welcome reaffirmation of the necessity of freedom of expression at the institution. Now, the institution must make clear that Yale supports Erika and Nicholas Christakis and they will not face punishment or termination for their role in starting a national conversation about the importance of free speech on campus.

Absorbing the events at Yale, Mizzou, and elsewhere, Nicholas Kristof, the liberal New York Times columnist, worries about the state of the political left right now:

We’ve also seen Wesleyan students debate cutting funding for the student newspaper after it ran an op-ed criticizing the Black Lives Matter movement. At Mount Holyoke, students canceled a production of “The Vagina Monologues” because they felt it excluded transgender women. Protests led to the withdrawal of Condoleezza Rice as commencement speaker at Rutgers and Christine Lagarde at Smith.

This is sensitivity but also intolerance, and it is disproportionately an instinct on the left.

I’m a pro-choice liberal who has been invited to infect evangelical Christian universities with progressive thoughts, and to address Catholic universities where I’ve praised condoms and birth control programs. I’m sure I discomfited many students on these conservative campuses, but it’s a tribute to them that they were willing to be challenged. In the same spirit, liberal universities should seek out pro-life social conservatives to speak.

More broadly, academia — especially the social sciences — undermines itself by a tilt to the left. We should cherish all kinds of diversity, including the presence of conservatives to infuriate us liberals and make us uncomfortable.

Mark Salter, the former chief of staff to John McCain, sides with Kristof:

Some conservatives select the kinds of news they wish to receive, preferring media outlets that echo their opinions. They mock and revile contrary opinions, but they don’t typically forbid their utterance in their presence, as was the case recently at Mizzou and Yale and other universities. The growing intolerance of the left deserves more media attention than it has received ...

Salter then illustrates the illiberal natural of safe spaces in public places by recalling the death of a close friend:

Reporters were waiting outside the church where his funeral was held. They tried to be tactful, but they were intruding in a space where a lot people were suffering a lot of pain. A few of the mourners resented it. But most, including his immediate family, accepted the intrusion graciously. They might have wished the reporters had covered other stories that day, but they didn’t argue they had no business being there. They understood the requirements of good journalism and good manners aren’t always compatible.

Baraka’s assertions of Israeli complicity in the Sept. 11 attacks, which he reiterated after reading the poem with vague citations to Arab newspapers, were met with applause and a standing ovation from the assembled Yale students. When he noticed my skeptical expression from the back of the room, he diagnosed me as suffering from “constipation of the face” and being in need of “a brain enema,” to the uproarious laughter of my classmates. [...]

I did not insist upon the establishment of a “safe space” to sulk in my humiliation. Instead, I retired to my dorm and wrote about the event, in my capacity as a budding columnist for the Yale Daily News. Baraka’s speech, and, more importantly, the rapturous response, I wrote, “was one of the most disturbing events in my entire life.” That this trial by fire was provoked not by the white skinheads or Muslim anti-Zionists I had naively assumed were the only purveyors of anti-Semitic hatred, but by blacks, who, because of our shared history of oppression, I had been brought up to believe, were supposed to be my allies, made it all the more distressing.

Today, I look back on the entire incident as a formative event in my evolution from teenager to adult. My experience at Yale of confronting painful ideas, emotionally vexing situations, and learning how to cope with them, informs my opinion about the events roiling the campus today.

Freddie deBoer, the socialist academic at Purdue, appeals to pragmatism as much as principle when addressing the activist left on campus:

[U]nfortunately, there is in fact a strain of the academic left that does see freedom of speech as an outdated artifact of white supremacy, which I have encountered in both my academic and political life. I recognize why student protesters might feel moved to adopt an anti-free speech stance. [ … But] in order to effectively fight racism, these passionate student protesters will have to win over converts to their cause. That’s not an invocation of an abstract political principle; it’s a simple statement of the practicality of power. Because the white majority controls most of this country’s institutions, anti-racist activists must rally masses to their cause, to utilize people power. They must gain the support of those who are not already convinced of their message, whether or not that expectation is fair.

The final word in this round of commentary goes to college students themselves, namely an editorial from the Claremont Independent, a campus newspaper at Claremont McKenna led by editor-in-chief Hannah Oh:

We are ashamed of you [the student activists at this rally] for trying to end someone’s career over a poorly worded email. This is not a political statement––this is a person’s livelihood that you so carelessly sought to destroy. We are disappointed that you chose to scream and swear at your administrators. That is not how adults solve problems, and your behavior reflects poorly on all of us here in Claremont. This is not who we are and this is not how we conduct ourselves, but this is the image of us that has now reached the national stage.

We are disappointed in your demands. If you want to take a class in “ethnic, racial, and sexuality theory,” feel free to take one, but don’t force such an ideologically driven course on all CMC students. If the dearth of such courses at CMC bothers you, maybe you should have chosen a different school. If students chose to attend Caltech and then complained about the lack of literature classes, that’s on them. [...]

We are disappointed that you’ve used phrases like “silence is violence” to not only demonize those who oppose you, but all who are not actively supporting you. We are most disappointed, however, in the rhetoric surrounding “safe spaces.” College is the last place that should be a safe space. We come here to learn about views that differ from our own, and if we aren’t made to feel uncomfortable by these ideas, then perhaps we aren’t venturing far enough outside of our comfort zone. We would be doing ourselves a disservice to ignore viewpoints solely on the grounds that they may make us uncomfortable, and we would not be preparing ourselves to cope well with adversity in the future. [...] The hypocrisy of advocating for “safe spaces” while creating an incredibly unsafe space for President Chodosh, former Dean Spellman, the student who was “derailing,” and the news media representatives who were verbally abused unfortunately seemed to soar over many of your heads.

Lastly, we are disappointed in students like ourselves, who were scared into silence. We are not racist for having different opinions. We are not immoral because we don’t buy the flawed rhetoric of a spiteful movement. We are not evil because we don’t want this movement to tear across our campuses completely unchecked. We are no longer afraid to be voices of dissent.

As always, if you have any dissenting views of your own, email hello@theatlantic.com and I’ll post the strongest, most persuasive ones.

Rob had a really great post this morning asking why American college students don’t strike the way students at universities around the world sometimes do. There are a variety of theories—you should read the piece—but I was struck by this quote from Angus Johnston, a professor at the City University of New York who researches student activism:

“Students in the United States today are living in conditions of economic precarity that didn’t exist in the 1960s,” he said. “As students have gotten poorer on average, tuition has gone up. And so they’re getting squeezed on both sides. They have a lot less ability to withstand the effects of … losing a semester, because if that happens, they’re gonna be screwed.”

That rings true, but I think it undersells the effects of rising tuition on campus, and what that might do to student activism. It’s not just that students have to pay more, which makes them more nervous about losing money. As tuition rates have risen—and particularly as state governments have drawn down funding for public universities—public and private universities have both increasingly come to look at students as sources of revenue. (For-profit universities just take this idea to its logical conclusion.)

That means that students come to be seen as “customers” by college administrators, and in turn they start to see themselves that way too. That has radical effects for how they interact with the university. Instead of being part of a bigger community, composed of scholars, teachers, learners, and others—a sort of “academical village,” to borrow Thomas Jefferson’s phrase—students show up, get the service for which they’ve paid, and leave with a diploma. Doing that leads to inevitable economic decisions: prioritizing fancy dorms, high-quality facilities, and popular eating options over faculty hiring, for example. Professors complain that students feel entitled and comfortable asking for better grades.

But it also makes it harder to see why you’d go on strike. Striking only makes sense if you see yourself as part of the integrated community, where the university’s direction is determined by a negotiation between adminstrators, faculty, students, and staff. If you’re a customer, though? Even leaving aside what you can afford, paying tuition, and then going on strike seems less sensible if you think classes are a product that you’ve purchased. It’s like going to Chipotle, paying for your burrito, then refusing to eat it.

A Honduran Garifuna who crossed the border illegally with her children gets help from a housing activist at the Bronx Spanish Evangelical Church. (Bebeto Matthews / AP)

A reader writes:

Enjoying the recent Notes. One thing your reader alludes to is that it’s much easier to study and argue about the “language surrounding poor health in an Indian slum” than the facts on the ground. I am not an academic, but in my own field, law, I am aware how much easier it is to work with words on the page and in law books than to get out and do the messy work with witnesses, etc.

Similarly, it seems to be easier to catch someone—e.g., using the word “thug” to refer to protesters in Ferguson—and get that person fired than to actually do anything about relations between police and the black community or the long exclusion of many African Americans from the the fruits of American prosperity. I wonder if this easiness factor might play a bigger part than we imagine.

A reader who would probably agree with that sentiment is Andrew Chen:

First of all, thanks for keeping so much Dish-ness alive at The Atlantic, and for providing a forum for robust, intelligent debate. I’m a public interest lawyer currently under a two-year-fellowship to run a clinic for homeless youth in Los Angeles. Public interest lawyers tend to be a pretty liberal bunch; I voted for Barack Obama twice and am likely to vote for Bernie Sanders in the primary.

And yet I, too, have become increasingly frustrated and angry over time with the authoritarian tendencies of student activists on college campuses. For some reason, the Mizzou anti-journalist chants touched a nerve, and I put down my thoughts here.

TL;DR: The attitude evinced by these protestors shows that, philosophically, they seem to have abandoned any belief in the individual worth or dignity of those who disagree with them. This is not only morally repugnant, but is also probably going to doom the progressive movement in the long run (which to me, is terrifying).

From the reader’s long and excellent post:

Put simply, political capital is a thing. There is only so much time, media attention, and political will to get things done.

I am a public interest attorney* (waiting on bar exam results in ten days - yikes). My job is to listen to my clients, help them with what I can, and on a broader level work to create a society which corrects the injustices inflicted upon them. In particular, the vast majority of my clients are young people of color. Homeless, runaway, gay, lesbian, transgender, abused, neglected, drug-addicted, mentally ill young people who live day-to-day, meal-to-meal, with the constant threat of mortal violence at the hands of law enforcement or another person on the street hanging over them.

My fights are to dispute thousands of dollars in unjust ticket debt, to force a school district to give a teenager an education, to find a way to make sure someone with no safety net has a safe place to stay, something good to eat, a friendly face to talk to, and a hand to pull them up if they fall. A phone number to call if they feel unsafe. A job, a home, a future. I had a client yesterday with a black eye come in and ask us to help her figure out how to escape from a boyfriend who chokes and beats her, and then threatens suicide when she threatens to leave. I had another client last week who got arrested and thrown in jail after asserting his right to reasonable suspicion for stepping into the street to avoid a homeless person camping on the sidewalk.

I guess my point is that in the fight for racial justice, in the fight against poverty, we have limited time and resources to accomplish the things we want to accomplish. So when I hear activists talking about how one professor’s alleged insensitivity to Halloween cultural appropriation is causing their friends to have breakdowns; when I see so-called progressives threatening and shoving journalists for covering their story; when I hear friends describe “conservatives” and "Republicans" like Hutus would refer to Tutsis, I see a swiftly emptying hourglass of attention for progressive issues.

If you disagree with these views or others posted thus far, please email hello@theatlantic.com and I’ll air the best counterpoints or differing viewpoints.

As an addendum to the Claremont McKenna note, check out this compelling scene. It centers on an Asian American immigrant student who brings some nuance to the discussion—but she’s physically interrupted and then accused of “derailing” the protest:

Over to Yale again, here’s a perspective from a reader with close ties to the school:

For context, I am a proud Yale and Silliman graduate and father of a current Yale student. The Christakises made two mistakes, one of substance and the other of timing and symbolism. Power is what threatens free speech. The Christakises recognized in the IAC’s email the power imbalance between the administration and the students; as professors and scholars, they related easily to students who might feel stifled by pressure from administrators.

What they didn’t think about was the power and privilege imbalances among the students themselves—something they have no personal experience of—and the fact that offensive speech can be an instrument of power rather than of resistance to power.

The ideal of the university is not to simply be a forum for free speech per se.

It is to create an environment where the free “marketplace of ideas” can flourish. Free speech is a critical part of that marketplace, but equally critical is that all participants feel secure and valued enough to listen without fear. Turning a blind eye to bigoted or similarly ignorant speech or symbolic conduct conveys a message of its own—that certain people’s fears and distress doesn’t matter. It conveys that Yale is not theirs, but belongs at its core to the same people who explicitly ran it for their own benefit for most of three centuries.

The Christakises are not racist, and neither are the vast majority of their supporters. They are simply people who lack the experience of being made to feel they don’t belong, or that they specifically don’t belong at Yale, because of their visible heritage. It simply never occurred to the pair how that kind of disempowerment skews the ability to participate in the marketplace of ideas: The powerless can’t hear, and the powerful have no incentive to listen.

The second mistake was context. The administration was originally trying, admirably in my view, to avoid outright punishment of offensive speech while still modeling good behavior and respect in a diverse community. While the Christakises email made some excellent points in a vacuum, styling it as a counterpoint to the IAC email changed the message completely. If you state, for example, that all of our lives are precious and worthy of protection from harm, that is totally uncontroversial. But if you answer “Black Lives Matter” with “All Lives Matter,” the exact same sentiment now denigrates and dismisses the struggles and concerns of people of color. The Christakises and their supporters failed to recognize that difference.

Unlike the “All Lives Matter” crowd, though, it is clear that the Christakises acted not out of bigotry but from a failure of experience and imagination. That is why the result of their email has indeed been a powerful teaching moment—just not the kind they thought, and not for whom they intended.

A very different view from this reader:

In this discussion, we are emphasizing the catastrophization of ethnic/sexual/gender slights. My understanding of catastrophization is this: a person treating a minor slight as an existential threat. In the Atlantic cover story, catastrophization is partly ascribed to a sense of entitlement or sensitivity on the part of a coddled generation. But I am not sure that this is totally correct.

I think catastrophization is two things: (1) a tactic for building a movement’s strength, and (2) a chance for young people to “practice” civil protest. Unfortunately, if this is correct, the movement builds strength at the expense of sincerity.

Take the Yale Halloween incident as an example. A professor makes a reasonable attempt to engage with angry students, and is met with demands for resignation. A student, apparently representing the feelings of the crowd, confronts the professor's husband, spews buzzwords until the man responds, and then she explodes into a profanity-laced tirade. The tirade seems almost unrelated to the man's response, except that she began it immediately after his calm words.

How can young men and women, apparently the best and brightest of America, be so absurd? What explains their lack of insight? Are they truly over-sensitive? They had to overcome some tough hurdles just to have made it to Yale. They can’t be this sensitive.

My understanding of catastrophization provides an alternative explanation. I think it is a tactic, one the European “professional revolutionaries” of 1848 would have admired. You provoke your opponent into attack, and then use that attack to solidify your moral high ground. Gain the sympathy of the public. You win a small battle, and you build up your power to intimidate.

In the Yale situation, the man’s response was not malicious enough to the young protester’s outrage. By his calm, he won the round. You can tell by the public’s mostly anti-protester reaction to the incident. But had Yale sent security, even to try and “ease” the situation, the protester would have won, and sympathy would be on her side.

Regardless of the Yale battle’s success, the movement can utilize incidents like it to prepare for future confrontations, which will be of greater significance than Halloween costumes. There is not going to be a Ferguson or Baltimore on every campus all the time—catastrophization is necessary to allow people to practice for the real thing.

Thus catastrophization serves both to solidify the movement’s prestige through small victories and to allow members of the movement to practice tactics in a relatively safe environment. It is not a random manifestation of entitlement or over-sensitivity. However, this tactic risks undermining the perceived sincerity of the movement and numbing the public to the public to expressions of outrage.

The college’s Dean of Students just resigned amid pressure from student activists:

Mary Spellman announced her decision in an email to the student body. She wrote, in part: “To all who have been so supportive, please know how sorry I am if my decision disappoints you. I believe it is the best way to gain closure of a controversy that has divided the student body and disrupted the mission of this fine institution.” The announcement came one day after student protests at the college, where many demanded more inclusive programs for what they call marginalized students, which include students of color, LGBT students, disabled students and low-income students.

At the 43:55 mark of the video seen above, Spellman responds to calls that she resign. At 49:35, two students announce a hunger strike until she does. Here’s the crux of the controversy:

In the past few days, an “offensive”email sent by Dean Spellman was widely circulated on Facebook and prompted calls for her resignation. In the email, Dean Spellman responded to an article that voiced concerns by a student of color, stating that she wants to better serve students “who don’t fit our CMC mold.” Her comment outraged several students of color, and the email was cited as another example of institutional racism at CMC.

The junior class president also just resigned, stemming from a Halloween photo she posed in that contained two blonde women in Sombreros and mustaches:

The photo started circulating early Sunday after CMC junior Casey Garcelon reposted the photo on her Facebook with the caption “Dear Claremont community, For anyone who ever tries to invalidate the experiences of POC at the Claremont Colleges, here is a reminder of why we feel the way we do. Don’t tell me I’m overreacting, don’t tell me I’m being too sensitive. My voice will not be silenced. I’m mentally drained from being a part of this community and I’ve had enough.

The class president, Erin Brackmann, apologized profusely to Garcelon and asked if she could please take down the photo:

In one of her messages, Brackmann wrote, “I fully understand your decision to keep the photo up, but could you please crop me out of it? It associates me with something I also think is offensive and a lot of comments have been targeted at me, by people who think that I was part of the group costume. I don’t want this to compromise my role and legitimacy as class president.”

Garcelon refused. She then publicly posted several Facebook messages and email from Brackmann and the other women in the photo. Apparently private correspondence isn’t considered a safe space at Claremont McKenna.

Howard University confirmed it was increasing security on its Washington, D.C., campus following an anonymous death threat posted online on Wednesday night. [...] The FBI confirmed the threat in a statement early Thursday afternoon. “We are aware of the online threat and have made appropriate notifications," the FBI said in a statement to the Washington City Paper. “We urge anyone who has information about the threat to contact the Metropolitan Police Department or the FBI.”

The threat was posted on a forum that appears to be a 4chan board, a photograph of the post has been shared widely on Twitter and Instagram.

Some words “by their very utterance” cause injury or incite an immediate breach of peace, and they do not receive constitutional protection.[2] Among the category of unprotected speech are “true threats,” statements in which a speaker expresses a “serious” intent “to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals.”[3] Even though statutes that punish unprotected speech have “never been thought to raise any Constitutional problem”[4] and Congress has made it a crime to use interstate communications facilities to make “threats,” the law governing this subject has been unclear.[5]

The federal circuit courts of appeals disagree over the correct mens rea requirement necessary to prove a violation of the federal threat statute. A majority of those courts require the government to prove only that the defendant knowingly made a statement that “was not the result of mistake, duress, or coercion” and that a “reasonable person” would regard as threatening.[6] Other courts have required a different, stricter standard—one that requires the government to prove not only that the defendant knowingly made a statement reasonably perceived as threatening, but also that he subjectively intended for his communication to be threatening.[7]

Update: A letter sent by the Foundation of Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), Greg Lukianoff’s group, to Mizzou officials today contains a passage especially relevant to this history:

[T]he University of Missouri itself is at the center of one of the [U.S. Supreme] Court’s most famous decisions applying this principle [that merely offensive or hurtful speech is protected] specifically to the public university campus. In Papish v. Board of Curators of the University of Missouri, 410 U.S. 667, 670 (1973), the Court held that “the mere dissemination of ideas—no matter how offensive to good taste—on a state university campus may not be shut off in the name alone of ‘conventions of decency.’” That case memorably upheld the rights of journalism student Barbara Papish to distribute a newspaper featuring a cartoon depicting police officers raping the Statue of Liberty and the Goddess of Justice, as well as an article titled “Motherfucker Acquitted.”

Flag desecration, funeral protests, and cartoons of the kind distributed by Papish are without question considered “hateful” or “hurtful” by some, even by many. With passions running high at Mizzou in the midst of important discussions and debates on the topics of race, equality, and justice, it is quite likely, if not inevitable, that some exchanges were and will be considered hateful or hurtful. It is crucial that students be able to carry out such debates without fear that giving offense will result in being reported to the police and referred for discipline by the university. Indeed, the expectation that the right of students to fully express themselves on the Mizzou campus will be respected is part of what has made the demonstrations of the last few weeks possible.

The president has been intervening in the process of producing a border wall, on behalf of a favored firm.

Many of the tales of controversy to emerge from the Trump administration have been abstract, or complicated, or murky. Whenever anyone warns about destruction of “norms,” the conversation quickly becomes speculative—the harms are theoretical, vague, and in the future.

This makes new Washington Post reporting about President Donald Trump’s border wall especially valuable. The Post writes about how Trump has repeatedly pressured the Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of Homeland Security to award a contract for building a wall at the southern U.S. border to a North Dakota company headed by a leading Republican donor.

The story demonstrates the shortcomings of Trump’s attempt to bring private-sector techniques into government. It shows his tendency toward cronyism, his failures as a negotiator, and the ease with which a fairly primitive attention campaign can sway him. At heart, though, what it really exemplifies is Trump’s insistence on placing performative gestures over actual efficacy. And it is a concrete example—almost literally—of how the president’s violations of norms weaken the country and waste taxpayer money.

In theory, Amazon is a site meant to serve the needs of humans. The mega-retailer’s boundless inventory gives people easy access to household supplies and other everyday products that are rarely fun to shop for. Most people probably aren’t eager to buy clothes hangers, for instance. They just want to have hangers when they need them.

But when you type hangers into Amazon’s search box, the mega-retailer delivers “over 200,000” options. On the first page of results, half are nearly identical velvet hangers, and most of the rest are nearly identical plastic. They don’t vary much by price, and almost all of the listings in the first few pages of results have hundreds or thousands of reviews that average out to ratings between four and five stars. Even if you have very specific hanger needs and preferences, there’s no obvious choice. There are just choices.

An ancient faith is disappearing from the lands in which it first took root. At stake is not just a religious community, but the fate of pluralism in the region.

T

he call came in 2014, shortly after Easter. Four years earlier, Catrin Almako’s family had applied for special visas to the United States. Catrin’s husband, Evan, had cut hair for the U.S. military during the early years of its occupation of Iraq. Now a staffer from the International Organization for Migration was on the phone. “Are you ready?” he asked. The family had been assigned a departure date just a few weeks away.

“I was so confused,” Catrin told me recently. During the years they had waited for their visas, Catrin and Evan had debated whether they actually wanted to leave Iraq. Both of them had grown up in Karamles, a small town in the historic heart of Iraqi Christianity, the Nineveh Plain. Evan owned a barbershop near a church. Catrin loved her kitchen, where she spent her days making pastries filled with nuts and dates. Their families lived there: her five siblings and aging parents, his two brothers.

“Every classmate who became a teacher or doctor seemed happy,” and 29 other lessons from seeing my Harvard class of 1988 all grown up

On the weekend before the opening gavel of what’s being dubbed the Harvard affirmative-action trial, a record-breaking 597 of my fellow members of the class of ’88 and I, along with alumni from other reunion classes, were seated in a large lecture hall, listening to the new president of Harvard, Lawrence Bacow, address the issue of diversity in the admissions process. What he said—and I’m paraphrasing, because I didn’t record it—was that he could fill five whole incoming classes with valedictorians who’d received a perfect score on the SAT, but that’s not what Harvard is or will ever be. Harvard tries—and succeeds, to my mind—to fill its limited spots with a diversity not only of race and class but also of geography, politics, interests, intellectual fields of study, and worldviews.

SpaceX and its competitors plan to envelop the planet with thousands of small objects in the next few years.

In 1957, a beach-ball-shaped satellite hurtled into the sky and pierced the invisible line between Earth and space. As it rounded the planet, Sputnik drew an unseen line of its own, splitting history into distinct parts—before humankind became a spacefaring species, and after. “Listen now for the sound that will forevermore separate the old from the new,” one NBC broadcaster said in awe, and insistent that others join him. He played the staccato call from the satellite, a gentle beep beep beep.

Decades later, we are not as impressed with satellites. There have been thousands of other Sputniks. Instead of earning front-page stories, satellites stitch together the hidden linings of our daily lives, providing and powering too many basic functions to list. They form a kind of exoskeleton around Earth, which is growing thicker every year with each new launch.

In its later seasons, the show started relying on heavy-handed historical references to do the difficult work of character-building.

When Game of Thrones ended its eight-year run on Sunday, the series finale, titled “The Iron Throne,” received a largely negative critical response. Many writers pointed out that the show’s last season had given up on the careful character-building of Thrones’ early days—a problem that, in truth, had started a few years back. The result was a seemingly rushed conclusion where multiple characters made poorly justified decisions and important story lines felt only halfway developed.

The show made plenty of mistakes in its final episode, but among the most significant was Thrones’ abrupt and uncharacteristic turn to moralizing—and its use of heavy-handed allusions to 20th-century history to do so. Characters who were once morally complicated, whose actions fit within well-developed personal motivations and fueled the show’s gripping political drama, became mechanisms to bring the story to a hasty, unearned conclusion. Characters like Daenerys Targaryen and Tyrion Lannister—previously complex and fully formed—became, in “The Iron Throne,” mere tools in the service of a plodding message about the dangers of totalitarianism.

Uber was the most valuable private company in history, but the public market has not been as enthusiastic. The reason explains a lot about how the tech industry works.

Uber is now a massive, publicly traded company. Anyone can buy Uber shares at a valuation of about $70 billion. This isn’t bad for a company losing billions of dollars a year, but it’s a fraction of the $120-billion valuation the IPO’s bankers initially floated. It’s roughly what private investors valued it at three years ago, when the company made $7.43 billion less revenue.

The White House can’t end the conflict by expecting one side to surrender unconditionally.

Is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict fundamentally about land and territory? It is certainly partly about that. But when you hear the objections and grievances of both sides, the issue of who has what part of which territory doesn’t necessarily figure all that prominently.

I recently took part in a study tour on religion and nationalism in Israel organized by the Philos Project. One Palestinian official whom we met told us, “I’m not going to compromise my dignity.”

The problem with what we know of the Trump administration’s “peace plan” is that it asks Palestinians to do precisely that. The entire Trump approach seems to be premised on calling for unilateral surrender. It is premised on destroying the will of a people, and hoping that despair might one day turn into acquiescence. This is the only way to interpret Trump senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner’s insistence onprioritizing economic incentives over political progress, but this misunderstands most of what we know about human motivation.

If mothers and fathers speak openly about child-care obligations, their colleagues will adapt.

I’m an economist. I love data and evidence. I love them so much that I write books about data-based parenting. When questions arise about how to support parents at work (for example, from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter), my first impulse is to endorse paid parental leave. Mountains of data and evidence show that paid leave is good for children’s health, and for mothers in particular. I am more than comfortable making a data-based case for this policy.

But experience, rather than pure data, leads me to believe that what happens after paid leave is nearly as crucial—that is to say, what happens when Mom and Dad return to the office. We need to normalize the experience of parenting while working.

The president directed his attorney general to declassify information—raising the prospect of selective disclosures.

President Donald Trump can only escalate. He cannot help it.

On Thursday night, he spread from his own presidential account a video of the speaker of the House, edited to splice together moments when she stumbled over her words, in an apparent effort to deceive people into thinking her drunk or ill. In 2016, Trump’s Russian supporters performed this service for him with faked videos of Hillary Clinton. Now he seems to have decided that if you want a dirty-tricks campaign done right, you must do it yourself.

At the same time, he has put the declassification powers of the presidency to work as part of a larger campaign of cover-up.

Trump directed his attorney general to declassify documents in an effort to depict Trump’s campaign as a victim of improper surveillance in 2016. Trump tweeted that the attorney general had “requested” these powers. That may even be true. But Trump has been demanding such an investigation of U.S. intelligence agencies since long before William Barr got the top law-enforcement job. Barr is compliant and complicit, but the idea is all Trump’s.

The president has been intervening in the process of producing a border wall, on behalf of a favored firm.

Many of the tales of controversy to emerge from the Trump administration have been abstract, or complicated, or murky. Whenever anyone warns about destruction of “norms,” the conversation quickly becomes speculative—the harms are theoretical, vague, and in the future.

This makes new Washington Post reporting about President Donald Trump’s border wall especially valuable. The Post writes about how Trump has repeatedly pressured the Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of Homeland Security to award a contract for building a wall at the southern U.S. border to a North Dakota company headed by a leading Republican donor.

The story demonstrates the shortcomings of Trump’s attempt to bring private-sector techniques into government. It shows his tendency toward cronyism, his failures as a negotiator, and the ease with which a fairly primitive attention campaign can sway him. At heart, though, what it really exemplifies is Trump’s insistence on placing performative gestures over actual efficacy. And it is a concrete example—almost literally—of how the president’s violations of norms weaken the country and waste taxpayer money.

In theory, Amazon is a site meant to serve the needs of humans. The mega-retailer’s boundless inventory gives people easy access to household supplies and other everyday products that are rarely fun to shop for. Most people probably aren’t eager to buy clothes hangers, for instance. They just want to have hangers when they need them.

But when you type hangers into Amazon’s search box, the mega-retailer delivers “over 200,000” options. On the first page of results, half are nearly identical velvet hangers, and most of the rest are nearly identical plastic. They don’t vary much by price, and almost all of the listings in the first few pages of results have hundreds or thousands of reviews that average out to ratings between four and five stars. Even if you have very specific hanger needs and preferences, there’s no obvious choice. There are just choices.

An ancient faith is disappearing from the lands in which it first took root. At stake is not just a religious community, but the fate of pluralism in the region.

T

he call came in 2014, shortly after Easter. Four years earlier, Catrin Almako’s family had applied for special visas to the United States. Catrin’s husband, Evan, had cut hair for the U.S. military during the early years of its occupation of Iraq. Now a staffer from the International Organization for Migration was on the phone. “Are you ready?” he asked. The family had been assigned a departure date just a few weeks away.

“I was so confused,” Catrin told me recently. During the years they had waited for their visas, Catrin and Evan had debated whether they actually wanted to leave Iraq. Both of them had grown up in Karamles, a small town in the historic heart of Iraqi Christianity, the Nineveh Plain. Evan owned a barbershop near a church. Catrin loved her kitchen, where she spent her days making pastries filled with nuts and dates. Their families lived there: her five siblings and aging parents, his two brothers.

“Every classmate who became a teacher or doctor seemed happy,” and 29 other lessons from seeing my Harvard class of 1988 all grown up

On the weekend before the opening gavel of what’s being dubbed the Harvard affirmative-action trial, a record-breaking 597 of my fellow members of the class of ’88 and I, along with alumni from other reunion classes, were seated in a large lecture hall, listening to the new president of Harvard, Lawrence Bacow, address the issue of diversity in the admissions process. What he said—and I’m paraphrasing, because I didn’t record it—was that he could fill five whole incoming classes with valedictorians who’d received a perfect score on the SAT, but that’s not what Harvard is or will ever be. Harvard tries—and succeeds, to my mind—to fill its limited spots with a diversity not only of race and class but also of geography, politics, interests, intellectual fields of study, and worldviews.

SpaceX and its competitors plan to envelop the planet with thousands of small objects in the next few years.

In 1957, a beach-ball-shaped satellite hurtled into the sky and pierced the invisible line between Earth and space. As it rounded the planet, Sputnik drew an unseen line of its own, splitting history into distinct parts—before humankind became a spacefaring species, and after. “Listen now for the sound that will forevermore separate the old from the new,” one NBC broadcaster said in awe, and insistent that others join him. He played the staccato call from the satellite, a gentle beep beep beep.

Decades later, we are not as impressed with satellites. There have been thousands of other Sputniks. Instead of earning front-page stories, satellites stitch together the hidden linings of our daily lives, providing and powering too many basic functions to list. They form a kind of exoskeleton around Earth, which is growing thicker every year with each new launch.

In its later seasons, the show started relying on heavy-handed historical references to do the difficult work of character-building.

When Game of Thrones ended its eight-year run on Sunday, the series finale, titled “The Iron Throne,” received a largely negative critical response. Many writers pointed out that the show’s last season had given up on the careful character-building of Thrones’ early days—a problem that, in truth, had started a few years back. The result was a seemingly rushed conclusion where multiple characters made poorly justified decisions and important story lines felt only halfway developed.

The show made plenty of mistakes in its final episode, but among the most significant was Thrones’ abrupt and uncharacteristic turn to moralizing—and its use of heavy-handed allusions to 20th-century history to do so. Characters who were once morally complicated, whose actions fit within well-developed personal motivations and fueled the show’s gripping political drama, became mechanisms to bring the story to a hasty, unearned conclusion. Characters like Daenerys Targaryen and Tyrion Lannister—previously complex and fully formed—became, in “The Iron Throne,” mere tools in the service of a plodding message about the dangers of totalitarianism.

Uber was the most valuable private company in history, but the public market has not been as enthusiastic. The reason explains a lot about how the tech industry works.

Uber is now a massive, publicly traded company. Anyone can buy Uber shares at a valuation of about $70 billion. This isn’t bad for a company losing billions of dollars a year, but it’s a fraction of the $120-billion valuation the IPO’s bankers initially floated. It’s roughly what private investors valued it at three years ago, when the company made $7.43 billion less revenue.

The White House can’t end the conflict by expecting one side to surrender unconditionally.

Is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict fundamentally about land and territory? It is certainly partly about that. But when you hear the objections and grievances of both sides, the issue of who has what part of which territory doesn’t necessarily figure all that prominently.

I recently took part in a study tour on religion and nationalism in Israel organized by the Philos Project. One Palestinian official whom we met told us, “I’m not going to compromise my dignity.”

The problem with what we know of the Trump administration’s “peace plan” is that it asks Palestinians to do precisely that. The entire Trump approach seems to be premised on calling for unilateral surrender. It is premised on destroying the will of a people, and hoping that despair might one day turn into acquiescence. This is the only way to interpret Trump senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner’s insistence onprioritizing economic incentives over political progress, but this misunderstands most of what we know about human motivation.

If mothers and fathers speak openly about child-care obligations, their colleagues will adapt.

I’m an economist. I love data and evidence. I love them so much that I write books about data-based parenting. When questions arise about how to support parents at work (for example, from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter), my first impulse is to endorse paid parental leave. Mountains of data and evidence show that paid leave is good for children’s health, and for mothers in particular. I am more than comfortable making a data-based case for this policy.

But experience, rather than pure data, leads me to believe that what happens after paid leave is nearly as crucial—that is to say, what happens when Mom and Dad return to the office. We need to normalize the experience of parenting while working.

The president directed his attorney general to declassify information—raising the prospect of selective disclosures.

President Donald Trump can only escalate. He cannot help it.

On Thursday night, he spread from his own presidential account a video of the speaker of the House, edited to splice together moments when she stumbled over her words, in an apparent effort to deceive people into thinking her drunk or ill. In 2016, Trump’s Russian supporters performed this service for him with faked videos of Hillary Clinton. Now he seems to have decided that if you want a dirty-tricks campaign done right, you must do it yourself.

At the same time, he has put the declassification powers of the presidency to work as part of a larger campaign of cover-up.

Trump directed his attorney general to declassify documents in an effort to depict Trump’s campaign as a victim of improper surveillance in 2016. Trump tweeted that the attorney general had “requested” these powers. That may even be true. But Trump has been demanding such an investigation of U.S. intelligence agencies since long before William Barr got the top law-enforcement job. Barr is compliant and complicit, but the idea is all Trump’s.